Is a Woman’s Place in the Household? Gender, Prestige, and Feminized Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists consider the household the smallest unit of economic and social production and acknowledge household activities have bottom-up effects on society. However, studies of households are not as headline-grabbing as “lost” cities and royal tombs and may be undervalued in terms of impact factor and funding. Archaeologies of gender and childhood, carried out mainly by women, have been confined to household contexts, as studies of public activities have focused on men. Feminist and gender-focused archaeology was how women began to be taken seriously in the realm of archaeological theory, but as Margaret Conkey points out, this archaeology is often isolated at the back of a volume rather than integrated into broader analyses of societies. As intersectional approaches to identity and inequality have become more popular, has the influence and popularity of household archaeology increased? Following Scott Hutson and others, I examine participation in and citation of household archaeology in archaeological journals over time. As a cisgender woman, I also reflect on why I was drawn to household archaeology and why I did not focus on gender or employ a feminist lens in my dissertation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36318.0